US Military Equipment in Iraq (2007)

From WikiLeaks

This spectacular 2,000 page US military leak consists of the names, group structure and theatre equipment registers of all units in Iraq with US army equipment . It exposes secretive document exploitation centers, detainee operations, elements of the State Department, Air Force, Navy and Marines units, the Iraqi police and coalition forces from Poland, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Armenia, Kazakhstan and El Salvador. The material represents nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq and is the first public revelation of many of the military units described. Among other matters it shows that the United States may have violated the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention.

Funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently a critical issue in the US. A majority of Democratic party candidates was elected to both houses of the US Congress in 2006 on an anti-war platform. Under the US Constitution, Congress has the 'power of the purse' to cut off funding for war, but Democrats have not yet sought to use this power. In late April, Congress passed a bill, HR 1591, which did not cut off funding, but instead authorized war funding through 2008 and into 2009. However, the bill was vetoed by President Bush on 1 May (2007) because it contained a non-binding timetable for withdrawal of US forces. With pressure building in Washington, further cracks are appearing within the US government itself. Some within the government believe enough is enough. They have leaked several confidential military documents to Wikileaks.

Chemical weapons

“

The use of chemical weapons by US forces was explicitly banned by President Gerald Ford in 1975 after CS gas had been repeatedly used in Vietnam to smoke out enemy soldiers and then kill them as they ran away. Britain would be in a particularly sensitive position if the US used the weapons as it drafted the convention and is still seen internationally as its most important guardian.

The [UK] Foreign Office [Minister of State, Mike O'Brien] said: "All state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention have undertaken not to use any toxic chemical or its precursor, including riot-control agents. This applies in any armed conflict."
[1]

The United States has been caught with at least 2,386 "non-lethal" chemical weapons deployed in Iraq. The items appear in a spectacular 2,000 page leak of nearly one million items of US military equipment deployed in Iraq given to the government transparency group Wikileaks. The items are labelled under the military's own NATO supply classificationChemical weapons and equipment.

In the weeks prior to the March 19, 2003 commencement of the Iraq war, the United States received a widely reported rebuke from its primary coalition partner, the United Kingdom, over statements by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the US military might use CS gas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently Washington has been quiet about whether it has deployed CS gas and other chemical weapons or not, except to deny, then admit, to using white phosphorus during the gruesome 2004 assault on Fallujah as "a smoke screen" and "an incendiary" — uses not technically covered by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
[2]

The use of chemical weapons such as CS gas for military operations is illegal. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, drafted by the United Kingdom and ratified by the United States, declares “Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare”. It only grants permissible use to "law enforcement including domestic riot control."

Riot control agents, according to former Clinton Administration National Security Council analyst Elisa D. Harris, speaking to the New York Times, are cited explicitly because they have a history of escalating misuse leading into uncontrolled chemical warfare. They given special treatment under the convention in a number of ways. They are uniquely and explicitly:

defined (Art. II.7),

prohibited for use as a method of warfare (Art. I.5),

required to be declared (Art. III.1(e)),

cited in Art. X.8(b) on investigation and assistance if used against a State Party, and

permitted for a purpose not prohibited by the Convention, namely, “law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes” (Art. II.9(d))

Most items on the Chemical weapons and equipment list were registered via the US Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, 5183 Blackhawk Rd, Gunpowder, Maryland.
[4]

There is the M33A1, as pictured above, a high pressure backpack CS/CR gas or liquid dispenser and the M254, its high pressure loading kit. On April 11, 2003 the US military TACOM contracting office put out a tender solicitation for 75 to 225 units.
[5]

The most numerous item on the chemical weapons equipment list is a vehicle mounted gas canister launcher, the "DISCHARGER GRSCL XM7", used to launch 66mm smoke and CS gas grenades....

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) hit hard

Half of all equipment purchases have been diverted to dealing with home made mobile phone and radio bombs. Not since the post war nuclear build up has there been such a decisive shift in US military spending priorities.

The 2007 May-July period, saw 203 US military deaths from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for 66 percent of all US combat fatalities.[6]

Those numbers have climbed steadily from the same three-month period in 2004, when 54 Americans were killed by IEDs, 31 percent of total fatalities.

Since the first recorded IED death in July 2003, at least 1,509 Americans have been killed in Iraq by makeshift roadside bombs, out of a total 3,707 fatalities.

The daily number of IED attacks has increased six-fold since 2003, according to the Pentagon.

In response, vast expenditures are being made on advanced technology to prevent, jam, detect, and destroy such devices.

The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO was predicted last year to have spent US$13,000,000,000 (13 billion) across all theaters, on detectors and robots to defuse bombs, improvements to vehicle armour, training and other means to counter home made weapons.

That sum is comparable, in inflation-adjusted dollars, to what the US spent building the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, based on figures compiled by Washington's Brookings Institution.[7]

The leak reveals 12,097 “Warlock” radio frequency jammers (US$1,100 million for the first 7,530), which prevent radio signals, such as from mobile phones, from triggering explosives.[8]

If we view IEDs as a rebel investment, to which the US must pay dividends in defensive equipment costs, then every insurgent dollar spent has a return on investment of somewhere around thousand fold. Significant price gouging by counter-IED defense contractors is evident. For comparison, each briefcase-sized "Warlock" IED jammer, of which is there is on average more than one per vehicle, is worth $150,000; however, as can be seen by this analysis, that is more costly than nearly every vehicle it was designed to protect. The "Warlock" producer, defense contractor EDO Corp, predicts financial year 2007 will see a 400% total revenue increase over its 2003 levels.[9]

Military robots

TALON robot and corpse in Iraq. Over 400 ground robots appear in the leaked database

The leak reveals over 400 US military robots operating in Iraq. The majority are used for IED (improvised explosive devices) work and reconnaissance. However some robot designs have a lethal capability.

Drone (robot) aircraft

Protective Armor and Equipment

Another interesting feature is the vast amount of protective armor and equipment supplied. There are 446,476 items of body armor. [10] Using prices from the publicly accessible NSN database, these inserts together come to a total over well over $233 million.[11]

Bulk cash counters

From the invasion of Iraq in April 2003 until June 2004, the US Army shipped nearly US$12,000,000,000 in cash, weighing 363 tonnes, to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Of this over $9,000,000,000 went missing.
[12]
The funds were drawn from the Iraq Development Fund, which had been formed from US seized Iraqi assets. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the legal handover of the fund to the new Iraqi government.
[13] The cash payment system has continued as there is no functional Iraqi banking network. With so much cash flowing into the country it comes as no surprise to find that the US Army has deployed 39 automatic cash counting machines.

Over a thousand safes for secrets and cash

“

[S]ome American contractors correctly believed they could walk off with as much money as they could carry. The circumstances that surround the handling of comparatively small sums help explain the billions that ultimately vanished. In the south-central region of Iraq a contracting officer stored $2 million in a safe in his bathroom. One agent kept $678,000 in an unsecured footlocker.

Safes have played an important role for US Army in Iraq: not only for securing important documents and official funds, but also as a way to hide away largess obtained corruptly from the US federal reserve, via authorities which did not care to introduce even minimal oversight or accounting mechanisms. The October 2007 edition of Vanity Fair reports on US$12,000,000,000 in cash brought into Iraq under the auspices Coalition Provisional Authority, of which $9,000,000,000 cannot be accounted for.

Below are listed the types and unit assignments of 1,056 US military safes in Iraq.

Chemical and biological portables

A slide used by Colin Powell in his famous Feb 5 2003 pre-war address to the United Nations. Powell claimed (falsely) that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) using mobile biological weapons laboratories.[14]

During the lead up to the 2003 Iraq war, the United States famously accused Iraq of possessing portable mobile chemical and biological laboratories. Post invasion no such facilities were found. Ironically Iraq now has at least five portable mobile chemical and biological stations — held by the United States Army. The portables are valued at US$622,051 a piece and used for defensive purposes. [15]

Minimum equipment costs per unit

Item prices were were located for approximately 1/5 registered items, so the following list is a minimum guide only.

Over six thousand million dollars (US) is represented in total, however for the reasons just stated this is a substantial underestimate of the total equipment outlay.

This intriguing list is too large to place here, but is probably the most readable representation of the items themselves (without reference to the military units holding them). See Iraq_OIF_Property_List_Summary_by_NSN_Price.html File | Torrent | Magnet for the full tally.

This intriguing list is too large to place here, see Iraq_OIF_Property_List_Summary_by_NSN.html File | Torrent | Magnet for the complete list.

Analyzing the Contents of the Leaked Document

The document lists US Army managed equipment in Iraq held by Army, Marines, Air Force and coalition forces, the Iraqi government, and at least one military contractor as of April 2007. It does not cover expendables such as munitions, printer cartridges or fuel.

The list itself does not include pricing information, however we were able to obtain pricing information for around 1/5 of the items by cross referencing with information obtained from public US logistics military hardware catalog databases. This process reveals that there is at least $6,601,015,731 worth of US Army managed military equipment in Iraq (nb. this is a minimum, the real value is likely to be five to fifteen times higher)[16]

Type, which is listed as either TPE, Theater Provided Equipment, LTT, Long Term Training, or APS, Army Prepositioned Stock;[21]

DND, or Do Not Deploy, which is a Yes/No Column;

OH Qty, or On Hand Quantity, the number of items.

We cannot analyze the document fully: it is a long list. We encourage informed users and citizens, especially those with military or intelligence experience, to examine it for themselves and submit their findings.

Further research tasks and questions

Make further comments on the units in the list and their significance. Cross link with other news sources.

Make further comments on items in the list and their significance.

Improve links and information for US war funding legislation and bills.

Include more details on what the various codes in the spreadsheet mean. Is there a public searchable database for Unit abbreviations or UICs?

There are specific issues with NSN codes. NSN codes are a 13-digit code. Of those 13 digits, 12 are decimal. But one of those digits, the seventh, is alphanumeric. The publicly searchable NSN database seems to be able to locate items if they have a number in the seventh place, but not if there is a letter in the seventh place. What is the reason for this? What does a letter as opposed to a number signify? Is there a fuller public database for NSN codes than the one given? Are these alphanumeric NSNs, Management Control Numbers as speculated?

About the Analysis

The analysis proceeded as follows:

Understand the abbreviations, acronyms numbers and other nomenclature in the leak (specifically NSN, LIN, UIC) using publicly available source information. The results of which have been documented in US Military Logistics and elsewhere.

Discover various public NATO Stock Number catalogues. Confirm the the validity of random samples of the leak using these databases and other deployment references.

By hand create tallies for a few interesting items observed by inspection. Write up an initial draft of the high-level analysis.

Using SQL, generate a unique list of NSNs. Write a program to concurrently query the US Logistics web-query NSN search for pricing information and extract the price for every NSN on the list (except alphanumerical NSN's which are not listed, probably due to being Management Control Numbers).

Pull in the pricing information to the SQL database.

Using SQL, generate a new tally by NSN, join this together with the pricing information for each NSN, sort by total price, convert to HTML and place it into the Appendix .

Using SQL calculate the total value of all equipment for which we have prices.

By inspection extract additional features of interest -- Notable Units , and items.

A full dump of the SQL database is available for your enjoyment here: us_military_equipment_in_iraq_and_afghanistan.sql.gz File | Torrent | Magnet . The table names are fairly self-explanatory and the columns are as mentioned here, with the exception of "fsg" = Federal Supply Group and "fgsc" = Federal Supply Class.

CREATE VIEW iraq_readable as select unitname,lin,nsn,pbic,type,dnd,oh,itemname,fgsc.desc from iraq left outer join fgsc on iraq.fgsc = fgsc.fgsc order by unitname;

CREATE VIEW iraq_nsntotals as select sum(oh),nsn,itemname,fgsc.desc from iraq left outer join fgsc on iraq.fgsc = fgsc.fgsc group by nsn order by 1 desc;

CREATE VIEW iraq_fgsctotals as select sum(oh),fgsc.desc from iraq left outer join fgsc on iraq.fgsc = fgsc.fgsc group by fgsc.fgsc order by 1 desc;

CREATE VIEW iraq_fsgtotals as select sum(oh), fsg.fsg, fsg.desc from iraq left outer join fsg on iraq.fsg = fsg.fsg group by fsg.fsg order by 1 desc;

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX nsnprice_nsn_index on nsnprice (nsn);

CREATE VIEW afg_nsntotals2 as select sum(oh),price,sum(oh)*price,afg.nsn,itemname,fgsc.desc from afg left outer join fgsc on
afg.fgsc = fgsc.fgsc left outer join nsnprice on afg.nsn = nsnprice.nsn group by afg.nsn order by sum(oh)*price desc,afg.fgsc;

CREATE VIEW iraq_nsntotals2 as select sum(oh),price,sum(oh)*price,iraq.nsn,itemname,fgsc.desc from iraq left outer join fgsc on iraq.fgsc = fgsc.fgsc left outer join nsnprice on iraq.nsn = nsnprice.nsn group by iraq.nsn order by sum(oh)*price desc,iraq.fgsc;

See Also

Notes & References

↑http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030225/text/30225w11.htmUK House of Commons Hansard 25 Feb 2003.
Chemical Weapons Convention:
Harry Cohen: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs whether the prohibitions on the use of (a) riot control agents and (b) other disabling chemicals as a method of warfare contained in the Chemical Weapons Convention 1993 would apply to potential conflict in the Gulf. [98166]
Mr. Mike O'Brien: All States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) have undertaken not to use any toxic chemical or its precursor, including riot control agents (RCAs), as a method of warfare. This
25 Feb 2003 : Column 422W
applies in any armed conflict. RCAs are defined in the CWC as any chemical not listed in a Schedule which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure. (A chemical listed in a Schedule is one identified for the application of verification measures under the CWC.)

↑http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article327379.ece
US forces used 'chemical weapon' in Iraq
Published: 16 November 2005
t on
The Pentagon has admitted US forces used white phosphorus as "an incendiary weapon" during the assault last year on Fallujah.
A Pentagon spokesman's comments last night appeared to contradict the US ambassador to London who said that American forces did not use white phosphorus as a weapon.
Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable said that white phosphorus - which is normally used to lay smokescreens - was not covered by international conventions on chemical weapons.
But Professor Paul Rodgers of the University of Bradford department of peace studies said it probably would fall into the category of chemical weapons if it was used directly against people.
A recent documentary by the Italian state broadcaster, RAI, claimed that Iraqi civilians, including women and children, had died of burns caused by white phosphorus during the assault on Fallujah.
The report has been strenuously denied by the US, however Col Venable disclosed that it had been used to dislodge enemy fighters from entrenched positions in the city.
"White phosphorus is a conventional munition. It is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal," he said on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme.
"We use them primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases. However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants."
Asked directly if it was used as an offensive weapon during the siege of Fallujah, he replied: "Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants".
He added: "When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke - and in some case the terror brought about the explosion on the ground - will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives," he said.
However in a letter yesterday to The Independent, the US ambassador to London, Robert Tuttle, denied that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon.
"US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to use appropriate lawful conventional weapons against legitimate targets," he said.
"US forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons."
Col Venable said that a similar denial on the US State Department's website had been entered more than a year ago and was based on "poor information ".

↑http://www.fas.org/bwc/papers/rca.pdfRiot Control Agents and the Chemical Weapons Convention,
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg,
FAS Working Group on Biological and Chemical Weapons,
For the Open Forum on Challenges to the Chemical
Weapons Ban,
The Peace Palace, The Hague,
1 May 2003

↑ See http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/an-vlq-9.htm for a description of this system. US equipment NSN database registers the value of "Warlock" at $150,000, however based on news reports of company contracts, this figure may be lower when purchases are considered in bulk. More research is needed on this point.
Half of all US Army equipment purchases have been diverted to dealing with IEDs. Not since the post war nuclear build up has there been such a decisive shift in US military spending priorities.

(Aviation Week)
Joe Anselmo at 7/17/2007 2:08 PM
EDO Corp.'s stock hit a new high on Tuesday after the Pentagon exercised options for 3,000 additional bomb-jamming devices used to help protect US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The CREW 2.1 contract, worth $210 million, extends the position of New York-based EDO as the sole supplier of the devices, which attach to vehicles and use electronic countermeasures to jam the radio signals used by insurgents to detonate roadside bombs.
The new contract was announced Monday night. EDO stock opened Tuesday at $35.25 a share -- up 6% from its Monday close -- and closed the day at $36.88. The stock has been in a sustained upswing since March, when it was traded as low as $22.12.
The company's improved fortunes have also led to multiple upgrades from Wall Street analysts. The stock now has eight "buy" ratings and five "holds," compared with three "buys" and 10 "holds" just three months ago.
JSA Research analyst Peter J. Arment reiterates his "buy" rating on the contract news and is raising his year-end price target by $4, to $42. But Citigroup's George Shapiro maintains his "hold" on the stock. He believes it's likely the Pentagon will spread future awards for electronic countermeasure devices to some of EDO's competitors. "Do not expect all the additional awards to go to EDO," he cautions.

↑ We were only able to get pricing information for around 1 in 5 of the items on the list. The more modern (and so more expensive) the item the less the chance pricing information is available and many items and nearly all replenishables from grenades to petrol are not registered with the database.

↑ This site was blocked from outside of the United States at the time of writing. There are alternatives mentioned in NATO Stock Number. NSNs with letters in them are not identified. In US logistics parlance, most, or all of these NSNs-with-letters are Management Control Numbers; NSNs which are assigned at the command level which have yet to be standardized and registered in the global NSN databases

↑ Written using US military abbreviations. For instance "HHC" = Headquarters and Headquarters Company, MI = Military Intelligence, MP = Military Police and so on, See US Military Abbreviations.

↑ Within the United States usually referred to as the "National Stock Number"). Many of these NSNs incorporate a letter and are not true NSNs, but rather appear to be pre-standardized, Management Control Numbers (MCNs) which are assigned at the command level and do not appear in global NSN databases; The first four digits are the Federal Supply Class in both instances and the subsequent letter represents the military command which assigned the code.